Molière’s Don Juan takes audiences on a feverish journey from seduction to reckoning, blending farce, tragedy, and the supernatural in a provocative examination of hypocrisy, morality, and the consequences of unchecked desire. In the free outdoor production by Molière in the Park (MIP), this darkly comic masterpiece proves as entertaining as it is unsettling, holding up a mirror to human folly while leaving audiences to determine where they stand.
Crikey! Garry Starr: Classic Penguins makes one wonder what the Aussies are consuming besides cold ones. A quarter century after Puppetry of the Penis, the lunatic 2001 production from Down Under that introduced “genital origami,” comes this brash, loopy clown show, written and performed by Garry Starr (the stage persona of Damien Warren-Smith).
Laura Strausfeld, adaptor and director of The Real Ivanov: A Comedy About Despair, describes her production as a “faithful adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s Ivanov.” In 100 minutes without an intermission, an 11-member cast touches the principal plot points of the Russian master’s first full-length drama; but little remains of the dramatic craftsmanship that gives each scene of a genuine Chekhov play the aura of lived experience. The script of the so-called Real Ivanov summons to mind Reader’s Digest Condensed Books: more has been discarded than left intact.
Terence Anthony’s The House of the Negro Insane, set in 1935 inside Central State Hospital, a psychiatric institution built to confine “insane and idiotic negroes,” is a searing drama about confinement, despair, and the possibility of freedom. Structured in seven scenes, the play has a surreal texture that director Daniel Carlton brings to vivid life—a world in which even those resigned to death may dare to imagine freedom beyond the walls.
TThe Bathroom Attendant, by Tom Kelly, centers on Johnny (Dan Patrick Brady), an affable ex-prizefighter who is down on his luck in Las Vegas. Living in a rundown housing block on the outskirts of the city, Johnny currently works as a restroom attendant at the city’s Mob Museum, but he believes his fortune is just one winning hand away—if only he can scrape together enough cash to play.
In Sophie McIntosh’s new play benevolent, four young women in 1917 New York endure life inside the Inwood Benevolent Home, an ostensibly charitable reformatory for “fallen girls.” More specifically, the work is set in the basement laundry room, where the women wash soiled sheets, toiling over basins with washboards and helpings of borax. McIntosh uses this setting to explore issues of class, gender, and desire, all rooted in the relationships among the four residents.
Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches is proof positive that some of the most exhilarating theater in New York City is being staged in Off-Off-Broadway houses. McIntosh’s 85-minute piece dramatizes what happens when Hailey (Marie Dinolan), a freshman acting major, is unexpectedly cast in the plum role of Lady Macbeth, and Rachel (Caroline Orlando), the queen bee of a college theater department in Minnesota, is left with big bruises on her ego.
